This invention relates to telephone sets, and more particularly to a telephone set that allows users to connect to a local area network.
In today's global marketplace, the average businessperson must travel more frequently to meet customers' needs. Travelers often need a quiet place to work while away from their office. Many work in their hotel room. In addition to increased travel, this age benefits from major improvements in the way people communicate. The internet, high-speed internet in particular, allows people to communicate more information with more people in more locations than anyone could have imagined even a quarter century ago. Businesspeople must harness this communication capacity or be left behind.
At the intersection of both of these modern realities is businesspeople being able to access the internet from their hotel rooms. Before high-speed internet, travelers who wished to access the internet from their hotel room simply plugged their laptop into the phone and dialed in to a service provider. People became familiar with this process.
Now, most hotel chains that cater to business travelers provide high-speed internet access by creating local area networks. Each room has a jack that allows the occupant to plug his or her laptop into the local area network. The high-speed jacks are often inconvenient to use, however. For example, the jack might be in the wall where it is difficult to find or reach, and where a cord cannot easily reach it. Some have solved this problem by placing the jack in a box on the hotel room desk. But this solution simply adds another piece of clutter to get in the traveler's way, and also adds expense for the hotel.